Articles published in April 2012

Recently I wrote an article with a rhetorical question for a title: “Are Customers Ready for Agile?” The idea stemmed from the fact that software development organizations have followed Waterfall methodology for so long that they h've ...

Over the last several years, I've been both a participant and a facilitator in many different stand-ups. As we know, the true value of the stand-up lies in the team's ability to continually strive toward the "commitment" for the current sprint cycle. The stand-up isn't a status report, yet often it becomes easy for team members to slip into a pattern of providing status-related information. I've used the time-honored stand-up approach for a while now, but I've often thought that a mature team could take these 15 minutes to a different level as it continues to evolve using Agile/Scrum.

We're all familiar with the Waterfall offshore paradigm of software development, in which clients and vendors engage in an asynchronous, sequential model for software development. The client spends money and time to develop a formal project charte...

As Scrum practitioners know, a user story is a high-level requirement of a feature, provided from the perspective of a stakeholder who desires the new capability. These requirements enable the development and testing team to think about a solution...

In July 2011, the Scrum Alliance website featured an article by Alan E. Cyment entitled "Compasses, Trees and Pains." It posed the question, "Am I doing Scrum or not?" Interestingly, one reader responded, '"Yeah, we're doing Scrum, but we have thr...

More than a decade ago I was programming as part of enterprise software teams, fairly well protected from everything not related to our planned deliverables. I had a lot of fun.
But then I moved up to become an architect and team manager, and I g...

Abstract: This article explores how to achieve the productivity benefits of an up-front enabling specification, given the reality that Scrum is an empirical framework in which emergent understanding of the story under development is inherent.
I l...

The community welcomes feedback that is constructive and supportive, in the spirit of better understanding and implementation of Scrum.